These days, many people feel like no more adventure is left in the world. All of the world worth exploring has been explored already. The ocean’s depths are dangerous and inefficient to plunge, and space travel takes too long for any hopeful explorer to reach distant, mysterious worlds in their lifetime. That doesn’t stop people from dreaming, and to many, mankind’s next frontier lies somewhere in the depths of space. This could be on a planet we’ve never seen or heard of, just waiting for hopeful cosmonauts to discover and colonize. This is where Lightyear Frontier comes in.
While many farming sim-type games will just throw you into a stretch of abandoned or otherwise misappropriated farmland, Lightyear Frontier fully leans into the idea of this new, exciting frontier, sending you too deep into the endless expanse of space to stake your claim on an uninhabited planet. While a sci-fi concept like that is ripe for adventures full of deadly hazards and strange encounters, Lightyear Frontier fully leans into its concept without straying from the cozy, calm vibe many farming sim players look for.
Besides being set on a distinctly alien planet, Lightyear Frontier uses its sci-fi premise with one big feature: Mechs.
You start the game after a rough landing in your newly plundered farming mech, a giant bipedal machine designed for agricultural cultivation on a planetary scale. While you do have a pickaxe, this mech is going to be your main tool for creating a life for yourself out in space. You will use water canons, hydraulic spice-axes, and other clever tools to do your farm work on a much bigger scale.
The mech is more than just a fancy way to retexture your typical cultivation sim tools. It is a core piece of gameplay with its own upgrade tree. The game very cleverly builds itself around the juxtaposition of farming and maintaining the incredibly advanced piece of machinery required to do so, tasking you with planting and harvesting seeds and refining aluminum and high-tech machine parts, using homemade vegetable oil for advanced machining.
I am a really big fan of the game’s inclusion of the mech with its farming elements. It goes beyond just mechanical, with the game’s aesthetic built around the idea of you living with this big hulking walker. Your home and other decorations will be appropriately human-sized, while mech-based workbenches are scaled up to be worked on from the cockpit of your machine.
The more natural side of the game is pretty good, too, if solid cultivation mechanics require you to exploit the local resources and plant some of what you take. If you play the game right, ideally, you won’t ever run out of anything you need and should quickly plant as much or more than you’ve taken back into the earth. Most things grow within one to two of the in-game days (sped up by sleeping), so it doesn’t take long to harvest your crops either.
The game takes a backseat to any real pressing exploration or production themes, focusing more on relaxing, cultivation of the land, and exploration. You don’t need to manage any hunger bar, so growing crops and crafting items are only for upgrades, decoration, or selling to the local merchant. Decoration is highly incentivized, giving you a comfort level based on how much decorating you’ve done around your home, which gives you bonuses to resources gained, which you get each morning when you wake up.
The game’s main focus is exploring and rejuvenating the alien planet. You’re tasked with clearing out toxic waste and harmful weeds from the various parts of the map, and doing so helps the land heal. It’s a pretty nice message, and when paired with the exploration of some ancient alien ruins, it makes for a pretty relaxing yet engaging gameplay loop.
There are no enemies, health bars, or survival mechanics, but some challenges rear their ugly heads for you to take on. Hazardous events – like weed seeds catching a breeze or toxic bubbles forming in the air – require your involvement in protecting your crops from ruin. It’s a neat little way to add some urgency to a game that’s otherwise very relaxing.
I didn’t face any serious bugs, crashes, or performance issues. The closest thing to a complaint I would level at Lightyear Frontier is based on the game’s mech physics. At times, especially when making shortfalls that I imagined my mech could handle, the physics would send my mech tumbling over. I’ve tripped crossing plenty of untrodden paths in the game, and most of the time, I thought, “that really shouldn’t have happened.” Thankfully, flipping your mech over is easy, and you can just keep walking once it’s upright.
I’ll be the first to say the game is not for everyone. There need to be more pressing survival mechanics to stop many would-be players from giving Lightyear Frontier a try. However, if you play cultivation games for the relaxing nature of farming, tending to the land, and helping it regrow, this game is definitely worth checking out. If working on an upgradable, modular mech in the process also interests you, skipping Lightyear Frontier would surely be a mistake.
Lightyear Frontier is a charming, relaxing cultivation sim set on the reaches of humanity’s final frontier, space. Well-thought-out farming mechanics are mixed with an interesting mech piloting twist, leading to a game that is as unique as it is fun to play.
Pros:
- Great farming mechanics, paired with an interested mech-pilot take on planterary cultivation
- Great visuals
- A relaxing vibe mixed with light challenges to keep things interesting
- A good message about taking care of the environment mixed into the game’s mechanics
Cons:
- Some wonky physics that can see your mech tripping where it probably shouldn’t
- A lack of pressing survival mechanics means hardcore cultivation gamers might not be quite as engaged with this title
Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Lightyear Frontier is available on Steam, Xbox, and Epic Games.